The boy reportedly bought a Playstation video games console and a mobile phone after enlisting the help of a shopping mall security guard to change around US$800 into Indonesian rupiah.

'We have deployed our forces to look for the boy, but with no results so far,' said local police officer Agus, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name.

The boy ran away from his home in a suburb of the capital after his mother grounded him for not doing his homework, the Jakarta Post reported.

He spent the night at the shopping mall and asked the security guard to take him into school the next morning, but disappeared after telling a teacher he was going to play basketball, the paper said.

'I'm just afraid that my son is being used by somebody else who knew that he had thousands of collars in his pocket. I want to know where he is,' the boy's father told the Jakarta Post.

The boy has been missing since Thursday, and Mr Agus said the local force had enlisted the help of Jakarta's metropolitan police force to find him. -- AFP